The California Raisins: The Grape Escape (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
151A playthough of Capcom's unreleased, license-based 1990 platformer for the NES, The California Raisins: The Grape Escape.
This was recorded from a rom dump of a prototype cartridge. The game seems complete, and my guess is that this is probably the version that was reviewed in Nintendo Power and that received an entire strategy guide feature in an issue of Game Players. There's an interesting (and quite sad) story about how the game came to see the light of day on the internet, and of the brutal murder of the guy that was responsible for finding it. If you care to read up on it, there's a rather informative article about it all here: http://www.nintendoplayer.com/unreleased/california-raisins/
I think pretty much anyone who has memories of being at kid in America in the late 1980s would have to be familiar with The California Raisins. I remember a popular old TV commercial that had the raisins (done with goofy stop-motion claymation, much like was done in the old Domino's Noid commercials) singing and dancing to the old Marvin Gaye motown classic I Heard It Through the Grapevine. They were a super creepy group of mascots, but for whatever reason they were incredibly popular - they even had a cartoon for a short while!
The internet seems to think that Capcom cancelled it at the eleventh hour because the raisins' popularity had started to nosedive around the time the game was slated to be released, and that strikes me as a plausible explanation. The speed with which they rose to stardom as a pre-internet cultural meme was only matched by how quickly and suddenly they were forgotten by the general public. I guess such is the fickle nature of existence when you're an anthropomorphized snack food that lip syncs and looks like a scrotum.
The California Raisins: The Grape Escape was developed by Radiance Software, a short-lived development house that had a knack for making games that didn't impress audiences - they developed the TG16 versions of Darkwing Duck and TaleSpin, after all. But the company wasn't all bad: their first title was the excellent TG16 port of Capcom's Side Arms HyperDyne, and in terms of quality, the raisins' unreleased adventure probably takes the second place ribbon. It's nowhere near the quality we generally associated with Capcom's purple-box games, but it's certainly serviceable.
The Grape Escape is a platformer that gives you four stages - a cannery, the grapevine, the maize maze, and a juicery - and in each the goal is to collect a giant music note. Once you've found all four, you move on to the sky to finish off the ultimate bad guy to receive the most ridiculous ending I think I've seen in an NES game. You know how sometimes things can inspire sudden, irrational surges of emotion? Yeah, that ending does that to me. And I'm not a violent person. Usually.
The game overall is okay. The mechanics are solid (even though those enemies love to bumrush you with little warning), and you get a dedicated moonwalk button. How cool is that? And the stage designs are nicely open without being needlessly sprawling - they remind me of the level layouts in Capcom's DuckTales game.
The graphics are ridiculously ugly (well matched to the license, I suppose) and lean way too hard on yellow, brown, and purple for the dominant color scheme, but there's very little slowdown or sprite-breakup to complain about. The intro's raisins wearing barrister wigs weirded me out a bit, though. I did like the music, but I have to ask: why is the song Maneater played on the stage select screen? Talk about random.
It probably wasn't any great loss that The California Raisins: The Grape Escape was scrapped before release, but it is really cool that such a game did eventually get made available to the masses. If you're in the mood for an authentic NES game that you would've never played back in the day, take the raisins for a spin. It's a fun, though short-lived, distraction.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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